


Of Coffee Tables and TARDIS's (Amongst Other Things)

by OctarineSparks



Category: Cabin Pressure, Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Sherlock - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Humour, Self-Indulgent Writing From the Author, Very Slight Bad Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 19:57:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1400557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OctarineSparks/pseuds/OctarineSparks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A big purple space incident causes an epic crossover. Sherlock is fascinated, John makes tea, Ten and Eleven get stuck, Rimmer makes a paranoid friend, Lister almost gets home, Arthur Dent gets to have some tea, and GERT-I gets cannibalised. (Also amongst other things). Also expect a crack pairing that I seriously did not see coming, and a complete ignorance on how aeroplanes avoid lightning strikes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Coffee Tables and TARDIS's (Amongst Other Things)

**Author's Note:**

> This is just an epic indulgence on my part. Time lines for each character may not be apparent and in most cases will probably be messed up. It's also a slight homage to the Discworld, purely because my brain went 'screw chapters!' Please, give it a chance and enjoy!

"Is this a good idea?"

"No. No it isn't."

"Alright."

"You ready?"

"No."

"Sod it."

Bang.

"Hm."

"Yes."

"Purple?"

" _Yes_."

-:-

It was the sort of lazy Sunday afternoon that John Watson loved. The sun was starting to creep down slowly towards the horizon, the fire was crackling merrily in the hearth, and he was just polishing off his fifth cup of tea of the day. It was damn near perfect, spoilt only by the fact that his flatmate was bouncing around the place like a demented frog that was missing it's Ritalin.

"Bored!" Sherlock boomed, though it did nothing to relieve the tedium.

"Yes," John sighed. "You mentioned."

Sherlock scowled at the smaller man and crossed over to the window in two long strides. He gazed down at the pavement with pure venom in his eyes. "Look at it. I doubt there's a corpse for miles," he muttered.

"Actually a good thing," John said, turning the pages of his newspaper.

"Is it?" Sherlock snapped. "The universe is being deliberately dull today. Can you hear that?"

John looked up, straining his ears. He could hear the occasional snap from the fire, the low background drone of traffic and Sherlock breathing through his nostrils like an enraged bull, but not much else. "Nope, can't hear anything," he said with a shrug.

"Exactly!" Sherlock expounded, pulling the net curtains back so violently that they were ripped from their wire. John frowned at him.

"Please don't take it out on the soft furnishings," he said in a tired voice.

Sherlock ignored him and continued to glare angrily out of the window. "Perhaps it will be better once it gets dark," he growled. "Murderers love the dark." He leaned in fractionally closer to the window. "Come on you big orange bastard, go down!" he crowed at the sun.

John shut his newspaper forcefully. He for one was used to the impatient detective taking his moods out on him, but when he started on the sun, it spelled trouble.

"Sherlock, stop it. Do you want a cup of tea? Calm yourself down a bit, yeah?"

Sherlock spun around so fast it took his blue dressing gown a moment to catch up. "I _am_ calm," he said, his eyes narrowed.

"You just shouted," John pointed out.

"It was necessary," Sherlock said off-handedly.

" _At the sun_."

Sherlock, choosing not to reply to what was clearly a winning argument, stepped away from the window smartly and snatched up his violin. He began to play almost violently, the frantic notes more than enough to force John to rise from his chair. The doctor backed slowly into the kitchen, his eyes fixed on the poor, abused instrument the whole time in case it burst into flames.

John made tea while Sherlock continued to scratch away at his violin with all the grace of the village lunatic, trying to ignore the headache that was creeping in at his temples. Suddenly there was a loud twang, followed by Sherlock hissing something that sounded remarkably like ' _fuck it_!'. John grinned.

"Everything alright?" he called.

There was another sound this time, easy enough to identify as Sherlock throwing the violin bow on to the fire, panicking, then cursing as he tried to fish it back out again. "John!" Sherlock called, his voice raised but far too level. "Ice, please!"

John sighed, and turned to the freezer, grabbing a tea towel from the kitchen counter. He opened the freezer door and peered inside, only to find something peering back out at him.

"Sh-" he began.

"And don't touch my fox!" Sherlock shouted.

Muttering murderous intentions under his breath, John scraped some of the frost from the sides of the freezer, unwilling as he was to delve any deeper into the chest of horrors. He wrapped it in the tea towel and walked back into the front room, where Sherlock was clutching a slightly smouldering violin bow and sucking his fingers.

"How's the boredom?" John asked wryly, handing Sherlock the make-shift ice pack.

"Shut up," Sherlock replied, applying the towel to the tips of his blistered fingers.

-:-

It was now nine o'clock. Sherlock had spent the last thirty minutes disassembling the toaster while John tried to catch up on some paperwork. It was proving difficult, however, as every so often Sherlock would laugh under his breath and say things like 'of course!' and 'well, obviously.' John tried his best to ignore it, but after a while he could stand it no longer.

"Sherlock?" he asked.

"Hm?" the detective replied, not looking up as he wiggled a screwdriver into the casing of the appliance.

"Are you actually _deducing_ the toaster?" he asked.

Sherlock paused and raised his head, fixing his friend with a look that John had begun referring to as the 'don't-be-ridiculous-John' stare.

"Don't be ridiculous, John," Sherlock said, giving John a bitter sense of victory.

"So what are you doing?" John asked with a put upon sigh.

"It's a psycholigical experiment," Sherlock explained. "I'm trying to catalogue the effects of desire on the id in an instance where the desire is slowly made unattainable by actions of the super-ego."

John nodded. "I see," he began. "So what you're saying is..?"

Sherlock pouted.

"I want some toast, John."

-:-

Half past ten, and Sherlock was becoming unbearable. John had toyed with the idea of going to bed, but he knew that Sherlock would only follow him there. It had happened once before, and that was more than enough times for John to learn his lesson. He wouldn't soon forget the terrifying experience of waking up to find Sherlock standing over him wearing an operating mask and wielding a scalpel like some kind of mad surgeon about to harvest his kidneys.

"I wanted some of your eyelashes," was all that John was offered by way of explanation.

"This is my own fault," Sherlock complained, getting up from the sofa suddenly.

"What is?" John asked, wondering if, much like a dangerous psychopath, it was a mistake to engage with Sherlock.

"This!" Sherlock shouted, gesturing with his hands as, for no reason that was immediately apparent, he stood on the coffee table. "The criminals! I have become too loud, too obvious with my unfailing genius! They must know now that there is little point to their endeavours."

The level of arrogance was so incredible John could almost feel the superior smugness hitting him in waves. Sherlock had even put his hands on his hips in some sort of subconscious heroic pose.

Thankfully, wonderfully, _brilliantly_ , there was a sudden, tired creak, and the table finally gave up after months of misuse and collapsed into kindling, taking the surprised genius with it.

John didn't even try to pretend that it wasn't the funniest bloody thing he had seen in ages. He dissolved into hysterical laughter, tears rolling down his cheeks as Sherlock scrambled ungainly to his feet, pulling fragements of wood out of his dressing gown.

"Oh, shut up John," Sherlock snapped, wincing.

"No," John said, still shaking with laughter. "You prat!"

-:-

The display on John's watch told him that it was four minutes after eleven when he finally pulled the last splinter from Sherlock's elbow. The detective's mood was dark and gloomy, and John sensed danger. Despite the hour, and despite the fact that he had to go to work in the morning, John would have killed for a case. Well, perhaps not _killed_ , not literally, although...

No.

No murder. It had never been that bad at Baker Street.

Yet.

He made Sherlock a cup of tea and sat him down in front of the television, where some forgettable action movie was blaring out explosions.

"This is ineffably stupid," Sherlock commented.

"Yes," John agreed, sipping his own drink.

The forlorn coffee table was still in pieces on the floor in front of them, like the world's least fun jigsaw. John was refusing to clear it up on the basis that he hadn't been the one who broke it in the first place, and Sherlock was refusing on the basis that he really didn't want to.

"I can't stand this, John," Sherlock said heavily.

"I can change the channel," John said, snatching up the remote.

"Not the film," Sherlock retorted. "Although it is of course mindless drivel with awful pacing and frankly, the actors are so wooden you can practically see the strings. No, I mean, this boredom! The tedium is so much that I can almost feel my brain shutting down, dissolving to mush and dribbling out of my ears!"

"That's impossible," Doctor Watson replied.

"I know it is!" Sherlock shouted, turning to John with desperation in his eyes. "Don't you see! All of this mundanity is causing me to resort to nonsense hyperbole! God, why won't something just happen?"

And then Sherlock's prayers were answered almost immediately as, with a bang loud enough to kickstart a second universe, something happened.

-:-

The Doctor looked up from his console.

And so did the Doctor.

"Oh, not you again," Eleven said with a slightly irritated tone.

Ten pointed at his pinstriped chest, his face a picture of innocence.

"Me? What about you?" he asked waspishly.

The TARDIS, which had clearly experienced some sort of meltdown at trying to accomadate the tastes of two different incarnations of her thief and was now looking like an explosion in a clown factory, whined at the two Time Lords. Who were, in fact, one Time Lord. Sort of. Bloody time travel.

"What is it girl?" the Doctors said in unison, before glaring at one another.

It was ridiculous, feeling a sort of animosity towards oneself, but neither incarnation could help it. On Ten's part, it was a sort of deep, ingrained grief, that one day, he was going to die and this bow tied, foppish schoolboy was going to take his place. From Eleven's point of view, however, it was more about hindsight, about all the things he wanted to tell himself to do or not to do in the past but couldn't. That and he really hated those trainers with that suit.

"Look, something has happened-" Ten began.

"Clearly."

"And we need to find out what. The TARDIS has crashed into herself, _again_ " Ten added, a slight edge to his voice as he rolled his eyes, "and we need to separate the two."

"Couldn't agree more," Eleven said, clapping Ten on the shoulder and racing around the controls, which looked like a novelty joke shop had thrown up all over them. He picked up a rubber chicken, regarded it with disgust for a moment before running to the doors and hurling it out.

He shut the doors again, took two steps towards the console, paused, turned, walked back to the doors, opened them, and went "Ah."

-:-

221b was far from alright. The poor flat had bullet holes in the walls, body parts in the fridge and sociopaths in the tenancy agreement, but nothing, _nothing_ , had ever shaken its foundations like this before. It was filled with what could be described as smoke, only it was bright purple in colour and seemed to have no adverse effect on the lungs, if not on the eyes. John Watson waved his hands in front of him, but it was no use.

"Sherlock?" he called. He wasn't sure if he was still standing by the sofa or if he had moved, or perhaps even died. "Where are you?"

He felt fingertips brush the back of his hand before gripping it tightly. He knew they were Sherlock fingers because the man let out a sharp hiss of breath where the blisters were rubbed painfully. "Here John," he said pointlessly.

"Sherlock, what the actual fuck?" John demanded, as slowly, almost imperceptibly, the smoke began to clear. "If this is one of your bloody experiments..."

"Not me," Sherlock's voice sounded from the purple fog. "Not this time."

Sherlock stepped forward, taking John with him by the hand. In the corner of the living room, next to the fireplace, (Sherlock was almost certain), a shape was beginning to take, well, shape. It was tall, almost brushing the ceiling, and blue. It seemed to be fluctuating almost, like a bad hologram, and Sherlock couldn't surpress the rush of excitement that flooded him. He walked closer, the structure becoming more solid and obvious as the smoke continued to dissapate.

"Sherlock?" came John's voice beside him. "What the hell is that?"

Sherlock grinned. "It's a police public call box," he said simply.

"And how the bloody hell do you know that?" John asked.

"Bacause it says so along the top," Sherlock said, pointing an obvious finger.

They approached with caution on John's part, reckless abandon on Sherlock's. And it was therefore with a sense of satisfaction for John that when the doors opened and a yellow rubber chicken was flung out, it was Sherlock who was struck squarely in the face. John snorted, and recieved a death glare from Sherlock.

"Interesting," Sherlock mused, leaning down to retrieve the chicken projectie from the floor. He turned it over in his hand. "Very interesting."

-:-

"Celebrities with unlikely jobs that rhyme with their names," Douglas drawled as GERT-I flew almost lazily over UK airspace.

"Hm?" Martin enquired, as he squinted at the artificial horizon.

"Russel Brand, stable hand," Douglas said by way of explanation.

"Ah, ok, alright, I get it," Martin said quickly. "Um..."

"Stephen Fry, cable guy."

"Yes, hm, very good. Um, let's see, Martin F-"

"Charlie Brooker, male hooker," Douglas cut in smoothly, raising an eyebrow.

Martin snorted in a very undignified manner, choking slightly as he regained his composure.

"Very immature, Douglas," he said between the hacking coughs.

"Yes, aren't you just?" Douglas replied in an amused voice. "Alright, Lucy Liu-"

There was a gigantic crash, and the whole plane shook and dropped from the sky like a stone.

"Oh God!" Martin shouted, gripping onto the steering column tightly, his mind blank of what to do.

"Both engines have failed, Captain," Douglas said quickly. "Comms down."

"Oh, Christ, right. No way to contact the ground. God. What do we do? What do we do?" he gabbed, panicking as his heart constricted tightly in his chest.

Douglas pressed various buttons and dials, but nothing was working. The plane was effectively dead.

"I'm so sorry, Martin," he said grimly. Martin looked over at his first officer, nodded, and closed his eyes.

-:-

"What do you mean, 'ah'?" Ten asked the Doctor's be-tweeded back.

"What do I always mean when I say 'ah'?" Eleven replied.

"I don't know," Ten replied drily. "I'm not you yet."

"No, but you say it quite a lot too," Eleven reminded him. "There's a fine tradition of 'ah' running through all of us."

That much at least was true. Ten walked up to the doors and looked out. The first surprise was that they had landed. The TARDIS usually refrained from doing that when she was feeling out of sorts. It only complicated things.

The second surprise was that they appeared to have landed in the home of a slightly surprised looking couple, one short and blonde with a slightly misplaced grin on his face; the other tall and dark haired, holding a rubber chicken and looking mildly furious.

"Ah," said Ten.

-:-

Martin opened his eyes. He was in the bath. The fact that it wasn't his bath was worrying, but at least there was no water in it and his clothes were still on. He tried to remember what had happened, and why on earth there was a lingering lilac haze in the air. Then suddenly, it all came back.

The plane dropping out of the sky. Douglas looking humble and wretched for maybe the first time ever in his life.

"Douglas?" he shouted, scrambling out of the bath after a few not very graceful attempts. "Douglas?"

There was no reply, and Martin groped for the door handle to this strange and unfamiliar bathroom so he could make his escape.

-:-

"Hello, sorry about the chicken," Eleven said hurriedly.

Sherlock took a few steps towards the man, his eyes looking not at him but _behind_ him, at the brain-breaking sight beyond.

"Impossible," he breathed. He pushed past the Doctors, chicken still in hand, and stepped into the TARDIS.

"Sherlock? What the hell do you think you're doing?" John called, slightly resenting being left to deal with the oddly dressed maniac before him, who was grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

Sherlock didn't reply, and wasn't sure he could if he wanted to. He clutched the chicken to his chest like a security blanket as he walked around the strange, fantastical room. It was far too big to even fit into the flat, let alone the tiny box that seemed to hold it. All around there were strange devices he didn't understand, and a few rather simple ones that he did, such as wind up dentures and whoopee cushions. He couldn't even begin to fathom the point to the place, but he didn't care. Something had happened, at last, and it was beautiful.

-:-

"I'm the Doctor," Eleven said nervously, offering a hand out to John. John didn't take it.

"What's that?" he demanded, jabbing a finger at the TARDIS.

"That?" Eleven replied, pulling a bemused face. "That's just my space ship-slash-time machine."

" _Our_ space ship-slash-time machine," Ten interjected, holding his hand out John also. John continued to resolutely ignore them both as he stepped towards the TARDIS. He was about to step inside when there was yet another crash, this time from outside, and he pulled himself away and dashed to the window.

"Well, that's new," was all he managed to say after a few moments.

Both Doctors walked up behind him to peer over his shoulders, which was easy given the height difference.

"What, you mean there wasn't always a small charter plane parked in the middle of the street?" Ten asked sarcastically.

-:-

Arthur Dent wasn't a penguin. Or a sofa. Or bleeding, or being chased or hungry. He was, however and as usual, tired, thirsty for some tea and wearing a scabby old dressing gown. He was also not quite but mostly alone.

He had woken up to find the _Heart of Gold_ almost completely deserted. He didn't mind so much, especially if it meant that that irritating moron Beeblebrox wasn't around, but the whereabouts of Ford and Trillian were cause for some concern. The biggest concern, however, was why Marvin had elected to remain behind. He didn't need that shit. It was far too early in the morning. Probably.

"Press the button, Marvin," he instructed.

"It won't do anything," Marvin droned in reply.

"And yet, I'm still asking you to press it," Arthur replied with a weary sigh.

"Press it yourself," Marvin said, in as snappish a tone as his terminally dreary state could muster.

"I'd say I'd gone off you," Arthur replied, slamming his hand down on the Improbability Drive, "but I was never all that fond of you in the first place."

The ship spasmed, groaned, relocated a currently _very_ distressed plane to a slightly safer area, then disappeared with a pop.

"Oh great. Now you've gone and done it," Marvin sighed.

-:-

Space, as someone once said, and quite correctly too, very wise man that he was, is big. Too big, Stupidly big. Pointlessly, horribly big. Big _and_ empty. But now and again, among the infinite blackness, there is stuff.

Rocks. Planets. Stars.

Spaceships.

Big, red spaceships.

Big, red spaceships that contained the very last, and worst possible example of humanity in the whole wide universe.

Dave Lister was bored. He was _always_ bored. Because his life was incredibly borning. He lay on his bunk, re-reading a magazine that he was so familiar with he could probably perform the task just as well with his eyes closed. The Cat and Kryten were pootling around a nearby asteroid, looking for supplies, but Lister didn't hold out much hope for them unless the supplies they wanted were rocks. Rimmer was off somewhere, and Lister had the sinnking feeling that he was plotting something. Some useless emergency drill or tweak to the rules designed purely to make Lister's life just that much more unbearable.

He leapt from his bunk in a sudden fit of anger. He was _pissed off_ with everything, and he wanted out. Fuck it, he was going back into stasis, and screw what Rimmer thought. Enough was enough.

"Rimmer?" he called, wandering down the corridor. He may not have liked the man, but he wasn't about to disappear on him without at least a small word of warning. Perhaps an insult or two for good measure. "Rimmer?" he shouted again.

He was finally rewarded, or perhaps that is too strong a word, when he entered the drive room. Rimmer was peering out into space, competely oblivious to Lister's appearance. "Rimmer," Lister said firmly, and the hologram flickered momentarily in surprise.

"For God's sake, Lister, you scared the life out of me!" he snapped angrily.

"Too late," Lister replied with a smirk. "What were you looking at?" he asked.

Rimmer pointed into the distance, where a large purple nebulous cloud was swirling not too far away. "Big, purpley space thingy," he said stupidly.

"Is that the official JMC term?" Lister mocked. He looked at the scanners, but they were throwing up the computer equivalent of a shrug and a 'Smegged if I know.'

"What the hell is that?" he asked in an awed whisper. The purple mass was swirling and undualting, pulsing almost as if it were alive.

"Aliens!" Rimmer said happily.

"Shut up, Rimmer," Lister replied automatically.

He looked down to one of the vid screens. "Hol? What's that?" he asked out loud.

There was no response from the ship's senile computer. Lister was vaguely aware the the ship was on it's glaicially slow course towards the anomally, and he frowned. "We'd never turn this thing in time," he said to Rimmer.

"What?" Rimmer asked, the intricacies of the physics of _Red Dwarf_ lost on him as always.

"We're flying right into it," Lister explained, with the patience of a saint and the facial expression of a barely restrained serial killer.

"Reverse!" Rimmer said pointedly.

Lister rolled his eyes. "By the time we'd even stopped we'd be up to the mess hall in the stuff," he replied. "Don't worry. Just a weird dust cloud or something. Keep your H on."

Rimmer narrowed his eyes. "I am the commander of this vessel, and as such I am ordering you to make evasive manoevures!"

"And I am the only person currently on this vessel with hands that don't pass through the controls, and _I_ am telling _you_ , we're smegged. It doesn't look dangerous, so stop being such a wuss."

Rimmer relented, with all the reluctance of a bulldog letting go of its master's leg. "How long?" he asked.

Lister checked the scanner. "About fifteen min-"

And with a gigantic boom, Lister was proved wrong, though it didn't bring Rimmer much satisfaction as everything around him went dark.

-:-

Sherlock could see a spiral staircase leading to other parts of this miraculous room, but the stairs themselves appeared to be missing. He jerked his head in frustration and pouted, but there was more than enough in this one room to keep him occupied forever. Suddenly he felt as though perhaps there was more to life than murders, and the feeling unsetttled him somewhat. Nevertheless, there were still some familiar things in his life that still mattered, and chief amongst them was-

"John!"

John moved away from the window at the sound of Sherlock's voice, leaving the two very strange strangers to stare down at the incomprehensible plane. People had begun to gather around it, and flashing blue lights indicated that the authorities were on their way. Funnily enough, and though it was dark, it didn't _look_ to John as though the plane had crashed. It was just sitting there, as though for all intents and purposes it had just materialised out of thin air.

He stepped inside the blue box. Then he looked at Sherlock, said "No," and stepped right back out again.

Sherlock hurried after him, a manic smile on his face. He grabbed John by the arms and spun him around to face him as they stood on the threshhold of the impossible ship. "John, wait, I know. But just _look_ at it," he breathed, turning his attention back to the room. "Isn't it fantastic?"

"No, it's symptomatic of heavy, _heavy_ drug use," John replied, suddenly wondering what the hell he had been breathing in. Just what was all that purple stuff anyway?

Sherlock shook his head and made a 'pssfing' sound. "Don't talk nonsense. I most certainly haven't been drugged."

"Well, you'd know," John said unkindly, taking his confusion and anger at the whole situation out on his friend.

Sherlock, as impervious to human nature as ever, didn't seem to notice the implcation. In fact, he almost seemed pleased by the remark, in the way he always did when he thought John had been paying attention. "Exactly!" he exclaimed, as though he'd always known his previous habit would come in useful some day.

"Alright, if it's not drugs, what is it? An illusion? Like a magic trick or something?"

Sherlock grinned even wider and shook his head. "I thought so too at first, but I've walked aroung the whole thing, John. It's real! Impossible, and real!"

John ran a hand over his face. He thought that he'd seen everything, and now it appeared that he had seen nothing at all. He needed a break, from the impossible, the weird, and the frankly disturbingness of Sherlock being excited by anything that wasn't a corpse.

He looked Sherlock squarely in the eye.

"I have to pee," he announced.

Sherlock waved him off and walked over to the Doctors, clearly to see whatever it was on the ground that was so interesting that it was eclipsing the magic blue box.

John stumbled down to the bathroom on legs that didn't quite want to work with him, and went to open the door. It was a surprise, but not much of one after the night he was having, when the door opened for him.

A man was standing before him, ever so familiar a man that he had to lean back and check that Sherlock was in fact where he had left him. That assured, he stared at the newcomer, who in turn was staring back at him with a horrified sort of shock. He was only a few inches taller than John, and his hair was read instead of black, but other than that, the resemblance was uncanny. He was also wearing a slightly creased pilot's uniform.

"I think we've found your plane," John said in a resigned voice.

-:-

"Don't be so pessimistic," Arthur snapped at Marvin as they stepped out of the spaceship onto what was, undoubtedly, another spaceship. "That's my job."

He looked around at their surroundings. They were nowehere near as nice as the _Heart of Gold_ 's, and instead they put Arthur strongly in mind of that god-awful Vogon ship. He shuddered. He really hoped he wasn't about to run into them again.

He took a few steps forward, and his foot caught on something small and hard, sending it skittering off across the floor with a metallic clang. Without really knowing why, Arthur stepped forward, picked it up and slipped the strange, palm sized object into the pocket of his dressing gown.

"Come on then," he said to Marvin. "Perhaps there's someone on this wreck who knows where I could find a decent cup of tea.

-:-

"It's a TARDIS," Ten was explaining to Sherlock while Eleven had disappeared back into the console room. It didn't really matter that she had materialised in the front room of a man who had identified himself as a 'consulting detective', but the plane added a distinct feeling of something being _up_. Eleven walked around the console slowly, but it was bizarre. It was making no sense, nothing was where it was supposed to be, and when he requested a damage report from the scanner he was rewarded with _La Marseillaise_ blasting from the speakers. He tried to start up the time rotor, just to see if he could, and the TARDIS all but screamed at him and shook violently. He was thrown from the ship and landed roughly on the floor of 221b, the doors to the TARDIS slamming behind him as a familiar grating sound filled the air.

"No! Come back!" both the Doctors cried, but all that was left was a burnt square of slightly smoking carpet and an echoing silence.

-:-

Earth.

He was only bloody smegging well on _Earth_!

Lister bolted to the humungous cargo bay of _Red Dwarf_ , and tried his best to ignore the giant tennis shoe that had suddenly appeared, parked innocuoulsy next to _Starbug 1._ He was back on Earth, for God's sake. Gigantic, inexplicable footwear could bloody well wait.

However, harder to ignore was the short, weathered looking man in a dressing gown who he had just slammed into in his haste.

Both men tumbled to the ground, while the strangest and most depressing looking mechanoid Lister had ever seen looked on. Lister got to his feet, immediately on the defense but at the same time almost falling head over heels in love with Arthur Dent, simply because he was another living, breathing, supposedly human being.

"Who are you?" he asked suspiciously.

"Arthur," Arthur replied. He had met so many odd people who always seemed to want to know who he was from the outset that there was no point wasting time with a futile 'Tell me who you are first' volley with the stranger.

"Dave Lister," Lister replied cautiously. "Human?"

"I think so," Arthur replied honestly.

Lister suddenly started forward and pulled the startled looking man into a rib cracking hug. "This is the best, man!" he exclaimed joyously, shaking Arthur around.

Arthur pulled himself from the hug with some difficultly, and not entirely completely. "It's alright," he said warily.

Lister was still holding on to him in a rather disturbing way, and Arthur, being British, cleared his throat nervously and looked at the floor.

Lister, being British too, but a slightly more working class version, continued to beam at the poor man.

"Hello," Marvin droned from the side lines. "Don't mind me."

"This is Marvin," Arthur announced with the air of one introducing a rather unfortunate family memeber. "Really, don't mind him."

Lister raised his hand in greeting, far too excited to give a damn about what appeared to be a suicidal robot. "How did you get on the _Dwarf_?" he asked, beaming. For all he cared this strange little man and his mechanical friend could be there to kill him. It didn't matter. He was home.

Arthur pointed at the _Heart of Gold_. "Our ship. It has this habit of getting us into trouble. Where are we?"

Lister grinned inanely. "Earth, man!" he exclaimed, and he rushed to the controls for the cargo bay doors. Arthur sighed, and, feeling that there was really nothing better to do, followed him.

"Look, I hate to be the one to break this to you," he said to Lister's back.

"I'll do it," Marvin put in helpfully.

Arthur glared at him. "Shut up, you," he muttered. "Look, Dave, was it? I'm really sorry, but Earth is-"

The airlock opened, and Arthur was forced to shut his mouth. They were clearly on Earth, but something was awfully wrong. They were surrounded on all sides by high buildings, Victorian looking ones, as well as police tape and a goddamn aeroplane. But that wasn't at all possible. Arthur had only been on the ship for five minutes, but even he knew that there was no way this ship was small enough to fit down a narrow city street. He glanced at Lister, who was goggling at the view as though he had ceased to function.

"Oh goody," Marvin intoned as he surveyed the exterior of the ship. "Trans-dimmensional emergency engineering," he groaned. "That always plays havoc with my diodes."

"What's that now?" Arthur asked, which was difficult as his mouth seemed to be insisting on hanging open instead of working properly.

"This ship," Marvin began simply, as though he were talking to apes, (which essentially, he was). "I estimate that it _is_ rather large."

"Five miles," Lister said, in a faraway, dream-like voice.

"Precisely. So, for whatever reason, someone or something, and I'm not naming any names," and yet here he threw a pointed look at the _Heart of Gold_ , "has seen fit to add an extra dimension to this one, so your ship will fit in quite nicely without crushing all the indiginous wildlife. Shame."

Both Arthur and Lister were lost, but then, they so often were. Lister was used to accepting everything at face value, and Arthur was just simply tired of fighting all the time.

"It looks different, though," Lister commented. "Old."

"Early twenty-first century," Marvin supplied without hesitation. "Probably 2014, if you want to be precise."

"Not really," Arthur muttered.

"It's February."

"Shut up."

"Tuesday."

"Shut."

"About eleven thirty PM."

"Up."

Lister was a little disappointed, but in the long run it didn't matter. Time travel wasn't exactly new to him, and it was better to arrive now than three million years in the future. Who knew what awful state the planet might be in by then? At least here there were people, even if everything was a little primative. But sod it. Let it never be said that David Lister wasn't a little bit primative himself.

"Well, I don't know about you Arthur," Lister said joyfully. "But I am going to find a vindaloo and a pint."

He was about to step out through the door when there was a hydraulic sort of noise behind him. As one, both men and the android turned to look at _Starbug 1._

The green door decended into it's usual staircase, and a faint purple mist swirled out in tendrils from the ship and quickly disappeared. Both Arthur and Lister tensed; Marvin simply decided to shut himself down for a little while.

A figure emerged from the small runner. It was tall, and broad, and it shambled down the steps as though it's head was killing it.

It was also wearing a pilot's uniform.

"Sorry, but would you mind telling me just where the hell I am?" Douglas Richardson demanded.

-:-

"That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?"

"Which part?"

"Well, all of it really."

"Of course not, you muppet!"

-:-

Martin had run to the window without a second thought for any of the other strangeness going all around him at the mention of the word 'plane'. He pushed through the small gathering of men at the window, and John reflected just briefly that it was getting both crowded and suspicious in Baker Street.

"Oh, God, there she is," Martin moaned as he saw GERT-I lying rather conspicuously in the middle of the street. "She looks alright though, yeah? No fire or cabin damage or anything?" He was looking from the Doctor to, well, the Doctor, before finally settling on Sherlock. He had no idea who these people were, or why he had woken up in the bathtub, but none of that mattered as much as the fact that he seemed to be looking into the face of a kick in the nuts personified.

It was him, but importantly, not _quite_.

It was him if he was the perfect height, (tall, but not _weird_ tall, he thought bitterly). If his curls were slightly more dashing as opposed to messy, dark instead of luminous ginger. If his eyes were a little bigger and not so close together. Bugger everything!

Still, at least he had the cheekbones.

Sherlock, for his part, was either oblivious to the similarites or simply didn't care.

However the Doctors were exchanging dark glances, and huddled together to whisper conspiratorially.

"So, definitely a dimensional crossover, then," Eleven said, straightening his bow tie just becuase he hadn't done it for a while.

"Looks like, what with the uncanny valley we've fallen into," Ten said wryly.

They both straightened up. The fact was, that without the TARDIS, they were stuck in this crazy situation. Together.

"Your plane appears to be fine," Sherlock said lazily, looking down at the pilot.

Martin shook himself. It could all be explained, but that would have to wait until he had found Douglas. In fact, this was probably all Douglas' fault anyway.

"I have to get down there," he said quickly.

"I'll come with you," Sherlock said with an inane grin, as now that the wonderful blue box had disappeared he wanted something new to investigate.

"Seems like as good a place as any to start," Ten said to Eleven, who nodded in reply.

The four marched over to the door, as John passed them on his way back from the toilet. "What's going on?" he asked Sherlock. "And did we find out who this man is yet?" he asked, pointing at Martin.

"Captain Martin Crieff," Martin supplied in a small, anxious voice.

"Oh, alright," John said, though it explained exactly nothing. "But still. You can't just march out there and look at a crashed plane!"

"It's _not_ crashed!" Martin whined.

Everyone ignored the Captain while Sherlock fixed John with a tired stare. John shook his head.

"Sorry. Don't know what I was thinking," he said. He watched as they walked over to the door, telling them he would be down as soon as he found his shoes. Everyone was pointedly not mentioning that Sherlock was still in his dressing gown.

John eventually found his shoes just as another bastard crash rent the air and he looked out of the window, dreading what he might see.

It was a spaceship, because of course it was.

It was about as big as a lorry, with the words _Red Dwarf_ painted on the side.

"Makes sense," John mused as he took in the vibrant colour of the ship. Then he wandered downstairs, wondering just when he was going to wake up.

-:-

Red Dwarf was small for a mining ship, but relatively, it was still bloody huge. So it was no wonder that three men and an offline android in the cargo bay didn't hear the wheezing, rasping noise of a TARDIS dematerialising in the engine room.

And they didn't hear it dematerialising in the female sleeping quarters, either.

-:-

"That's still just two. We _do_ need three."

"Who's the Time Lord here?"

"Well... neither of us."

"Alright, yes. But _I_ am the closest."

-:-

"Is that what I think it is?" Ten asked with a vague wonderment in his voice as they came to a stop before the minaturised _Red Dwarf._

He pulled his spectacles from his pocket and walked around it, his face alight with joy. "Oh my word, it is, it really is. A JMC mining vessel. Cor, I haven't seen one of these in centuries!"

"Nerd," Eleven muttered under his breath.

"It's a little smaller than usual," the Ten continued, ignoring his future self. "Alright, a lot smaller. Must be a replica... but it is incredibly detailed."

Sherlock looked at the ship as though it was annoying him. He'd come to investigate a random, normal sized plane, and now he was faced with a scaled-down mining ship. He didn't know which to go for first, but as the tiny Captain had already bypassed the red ship completely and thrown himself against the door of the aircraft, it looked like someone had already made the decision for him.

"Douglas!" Martin shouted, hammering on the door of the plane. Then reason caught up with his senses and he remembered how to open the bloody thing. He pulled the door wide and bolted inside the plane just as John emerged from 221b. He ran down the aisle and pulled open the flight deck door.

"Douglas? Douglas?" he said, as though somehow the six foot odd man would be hiding somewhere in the tiny cockpit. Perhaps he was under one of the seats.

When he eventually realised that Douglas was not the world's foremost hide-and-seek champion, (at least, as far as he knew, but with Douglas one could never be sure), he ran back out of the flight deck, checking the galley and the cabin and even the toilet in his desperation. GERT-I had been failing, Douglas had been there with him, and Carolyn was going to be mad as hell when she found out what he and Douglas had been doing with her plane while she and her son were on holiday. He wanted Douglas to sit him down and tell him what to do, possibly while calling him a twat.

No, that's not right.

Moron, perhaps, but never twat.

Oh, but he _was_ a twat though, he thought anxiously as he flung himself out of the plane again and raced to the hold doors. He didn't have the key for the hold.

"Douglas?" he bellowed. He couldn't see how Douglas could have miraculously moved from the flight deck to the hold, but then, this was coming from a man who had moved from the flight deck to a bathtub.

Douglas didn't answer. He was either being extremely chldish, extremely dead, or he simply wasn't on the plane. Martin hoped for the latter.

"He's not here," he wailed desperately to Eleven, who happened to be closest.

"Who isn't?" Eleven asked as Sherlock, who was disappointed to find that the only thing remarkable about the plane was it's location, wandered off to investigate the spaceship instead.

"My First Officer," Martin panted. "We were in the middle of a word game... uh, flight, and then the engines died and the plane lost all power and we were falling and then..."

"Bathroom?" John supplied.

"Bathroom," Martin said with a nod.

Ten looked back up at the flat. "Maybe he's still up there. Lodged in the cupboard under the sink or something."

"Oh God, I hope not," John said, blanching. Only the other day John had looked under there trying to find bleach and had found a tupperware box full of what turned out to be horse semen instead. Sherlock had said it was 'marinating', altough marinating what John was far too frightened to ask.

Sherlock, however, made a small noise of surprise behind the three. They all turned to see the small door of the spaceship sliding open. At first it seemed as though the people inside didn't notice those on the outside. They were having a conversation of sorts, and Eleven was certain he heard the words 'trans-dimensional ememrgency engineering' being spoke by someone who was clearly clincally depressed.

It was only when Sherlock took a step back that anyone worried, as the men inside, still oblivious to them, turned to look at something deep inside the ship.

"Sherlock, what is it?" John muttered.

"You," Sherlock replied.

-:-

"I have no idea what is going on, but if this a practical joke by Martin, I will eat his hat. Which will be no easy feat, let me tell you," Douglas said, as he walked towards the other men.

"What on earth is that?" he asked, pointing at the huddled form of Marvin.

"Doesn't matter," Arthur replied, quite happy to leave the android far behind and get off the opressive ship.

"I'm Dave, this is Rimmer," he said, pointing at Arthur.

"Arthur," Arthur corrected him bluntly.

"Yeah, that's right. Sorry man," Lister said.

Rimmer. He hadn't even thought about the annoying second-technician in all his excitement. But that was a quandry. If Lister left the cargo bay, Rimmer couldn't follow him, not without Kryten being nearby to sustain him. But then again, he was back on Earth, an Earth from the past, where for all he knew they might treat Rimmer as some sort of ghost and try to exorcise him.

Come to think of it, he didn't even know where Rimmer _was_.

He looked outside, torn for just a moment, then turned back to the two men. "Go on, I'll catch up," he said, hating himself.

Arthur turned back to the door with Douglas at his side, and was just about to step about when he saw a tall, thin man staring at him as though he had two heads. And as that was Zaphod's party trick, he knew it wasn't the case. As the man backed away, Arthur indignantly strode out of the ship just in time to hear the stranger say, 'You'. And then he saw who the word was addressed at, and privately told the universe to go and fuck itself.

John Watson couldn't know, but at that moment he and Arthur Dent shared the exact same thought.

He walked towards, well, himself, slowly. It was like some horrible lovechild of he and Sherlock, but only for that exact moment, as he looked just like John but he was wearing a bloody dressing gown. "What the hell?" he said, as Arthur began to walk towards him, wearing the same expression of bewilderment. The _exact_ same expression.

"Douglas!" Martin suddenly shouted, not noticing that he was in the middle of the world's oddest meeting, and he ran towards his First Officer in a fashion that not only would he later regret, but that Douglas would remind him about mercilessly for years to come.

"Martin?" Douglas replied, playing it cool but inside he was so relieved to see his Captain he could have wept. He had wanted to scream and rage since he had woken up in a strange bunk on a strange vessel on an even _stranger_ vessel with a couple of strangers, one of whom was wearing a robe. Martin, who looked confused and upset and remarkably like the tall man next to him, only managed to stop himself about a foot away from Douglas, panting heavily.

"You're not dead!" he said, grinning and trying to catch his breath.

"Neither are you," Douglas said smoothly. "And neither," he said, walking towards another familiar sight, "is GERT-I."

"No, she's... fine..." Martin said, clutching a stitch in his side. Really, it hadn't been either that far a distance or that far a run. He really needed to get himself into shape.

"And yet, I still haven't even the vaguest clue what is going on," he said.

"You're not the only one," John and Arthur said, still staring at each other will slack-jawed awe.

-:-

"Hol? Hol, are you working yet?" Lister called as he walked back towards the drive room.

"Some buggers gone and interfered with my dimensions!" came the indignant reply.

Lister sagged in relief. Holly was back on line, which meant he could find Rimmer and... and...

And tell him that he was leaving him behind.

Kryten and the Cat where God knows where, three million years in the future and he didn't know what to do about that. But Rimmer, wherever he was, had at least been on the ship at the time of the incident, but there was really no way even Rimmer would expect him to stay on the ship, not when all of the Earth was out there for taking.

What was he thinking? That was _exactly_ what Rimmer would expect.

"Holly, where's Rimmer?" Lister asked, slumping down into one of the chairs.

"No, idea," Holly replied, somehow managing to shrug with only his face.

Lister frowned. "Did you scan for him or are you just guessing?"

Holly gave Lister a dirty look then paused for a moment.

"The holographic representation of Second Technician Arnold J. Rimmer is no longer aboard the ship," he said in a bored voice.

"What? Not at all? Where's his light bee?"

"The holographic represen-"

"Yeah, yeah, alright Hol," Lister said hurriedly.

Well, that changed things a bit, Lister supposed. If Rimmer wasn't on the ship, then Lister wasn't _really_ leaving him behind.

"Ah. Poor Rimmer," he said quickly.

"Shouldn't think so. Now that I'm online again, his light bee should have rebooted, wherever it is."

"What? But Krytes is... well, in the future," Lister said incredulously. "How can Rimmer be up and running without him?"

Holly laughed patronisingly. "Did you forget about that barney they had the other day?"

Lister paused. "The one where Rimmer said he was going to remove Kryten's head and use it to block up his groinal attachment?" he said, after thinking about it for a moment.

"That's the one," Holly said. "Well, Kryten decided that it might be a good time to modify Arnold's light bee, make it more self sufficient, as it were. As long as I'm up and running, a signal will be sent to his light bee which means he can retrieve all the necessary information needed to reboot. Kryten was up for about a week fixing that up. Didn't power down once. By the end of it he was holed up in the med bay, a heart monitor strapped to his groin singing ' _The Hills Are Alive_ '. But it worked."

"So Rimmer is fine then? Brutal," Lister said, leaving the drive room at once so he could return to the cargo bay, and to freedom.

"Well, apart from being dead," Holly muttered to himself.

-:-

Arthur was feeling very hard done by, as usual. Not only had he been faced with his slightly smarter, slightly better dressed and much more awesome counterpart when it came to bravery and intelligence, (Checklist. Soldier? Check. Doctor? Check. Was he actually good at either of those things? Apparently so). Not only that, but as the remarkably strange party had turned to return to Captain Fantastic and his lanky sidekick Arrogant Man's flat, yet another stranger had burst onto the scene. And this time from pocket, of all places.

And of all of them, he was the strangest of all, as out of the one, two... _eight_ men, he was the only one who was intangible. He was standing half _through_ Arthur, which Arthur was not best pleased about at all. Luckily, the newcomer, who flickered occasionally and seemed to have a large letter 'H' plastered to his forehead, soon moved out to occupy his own space.

"Alright, what the smeg is going on?" Rimmer asked, though his immediate anger was naturally replaced with his usual fear. "What the hell happened to the ship?" he asked, pointing at the now very much smaller _Red Dwarf_.

"Oh my God, a JMC hologram!" Ten said delightedly, bouning on his feet and looking Rimmer up and down like he was some sort of circus atrraction. "How are you even functioning outside of your holographic grid? Amazing!"

Rimmer swatted ineffectually at the excited idiot before him. "What on Earth are you babbling about, you gimboid?"

"He does that a lot," Eleven interjected.

"Wait, can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?" John demanded, but it really looked like no one present actually could.

"I woldn't mind knowing either," Martin said in a small voice while Douglas nodded beside him.

They were interrupted by the cargo bay door of Red Dwarf opening once again, and this time another man stumbled out, drinking in the scene with hungry eyes. Or thirsty eyes. It was a maelstrom of descriptives, anyway. He was grinning inanely at everything, and his smile didn't falter when he saw the unlikely band of people standing in front of him, even if two of them were almost identical twins and another pair _defintiely_ were. His eyes finally settled on Rimmer, and he felt a mixture of relief but mostly dread.

"Rimmer!" he called, walking up to the group.

Rimmer set his face into the expression he usually reserved for Lister when the Liverpudlian had rather royally smegged something up.

"Lister, what the bloody buggering hell have you done this time?" he demanded.

"Big purple space thingy," Lister said, by way of explanation.

Everyone looked to everyone else blankly for a moment. Everyone except Sherlock, who was standing with his fingers steepled beneath his chin.

"Alright, enough," he said, his voice quiet but enough to silence every movement and sound around him, which both secretly impressed and infuriated Doulgas. "This situation is getting beyond tedious," he said lightly. "I suggest we all retire upstairs, and try to figure out at least the basic principles."

No one could think of a better idea, so they all traipsed back upstairs, with John being left to make all the bloody tea.

-:-

"Alright, I understand the two Doctors."

"Yeah, that's a bit obvious."

"And I can almost understand the red spaceship and the one shaped like a shoe."

"Hm, yes, spaceships are good."

"But what I don't understand, is the airline pilots and the scary detective and his long suffering boyfriend."

"Yeah, no, I don't get that either. But I don't think he is-"

"Can you fix this?"

"If I could, don't you think I would have fixed it by now?"

"Well, you've not actually done much."

"I will thump you."

"Sorry."

"Alright, hold on, let me just... Oh."

"Did you-?"

"..."

"Did you just _make_ a Dalek?"

"Maybe."

"Good-o."

"Wizard."

-:-

"So let us begin with who we are," Sherlock began slowly. He had finally gotten some clothes on, despite the hour and much to Arthur's chargin, who now felt severely eccentric despite sitting next to a man in a bow tie.

"I am Sherlock Holmes, this is my flat and John Watson," here John raised his hand, "is my flatmate and friend."

Ten raised his eyebrows but for once managed to keep his mouth shut.

"Then we have two men, who look completely different but are, apparently, the same man," Sherlock continued, gesturing at the Doctors. "And two men who look the same but are in fact two people," he said, nodding at John again and also Arthur.

"Don't forget you and Martin," John interjected.

"What about me and Martin?" Sherlock said, forgoing grammar for the sake of effect.

"Nothing," John said, which earned him a scowl from Martin.

"Carrying on," Sherlock said, slightly irked by the interruption. "The Doctors have assured me that they are in fact a time travelling alien from a long since lost-but-then-found again planet who have a nasty habit of crossing their own time line. They also have the ability to regenerate when mortally wounded, which explains the two different appearances. Neither of which is particuarly sensible."

John snorted.

"Also we have Captain Martin Crieff and First Officer Douglas Richardson, whose charter plane is currently situated in the middle of Baker Street where it shall remain thanks to my strongly worded text to Detective Inspector Lestrade of New Scotland Yard."

"That rhymes," Arthur said stupidly.

"Remind me to call him later and make peace," John cut in.

"Also among us is Arthur Dent, to whom I referred earlier, who hails from the eighties, so is probably quite glad to find himself in 2014."

"I'm honestly not bothered anymore just so long as there is tea," Arthur said, toasting John with his mug, which had a giraffe on the side.

"Arthur apparently hitched a lift on an alien ship when Earth was bulldozed to make way for a hyperspace bypass," he said, earning an approving nod from Arthur. "But clearly not as we are still, in fact, on Earth."

"Poof," Arthur said both miserably and insistently. "All gone."

"Indeed. And lastly we have David Lister and Arnold Rimmer, who come possibly from the 23rd century but have, and I quote, 'forgotten'."

"Sorry, it's hard to keep track," Rimmer interjected.

"Yeah man, you've got no idea," Lister added.

"I might," Ten said, while beside him Eleven raised his hand and nodded.

"And Mr. Rimmer is, incidentally, a hologram, having died some years previously in a radiation leak." Rimmer nodded, a little proud of himself for the rather easy accompishment of being dead.

"This is still not making any sense," John said, glancing at the clock. It was nearly one in the morning now, and all of them were gathered around the still splintered remains of the coffee table.

"I don't expect it to, John, I am simply relaying the facts. If they are indeed, facts." He took a sip of his tea before continuing. "There was a vessel in this very room, a trans-dimensional, time travelling, semi-sentient vessel that saw fit to take itself off to deal with what I am told was 'a nasty shock to its time couplings'.We also have an aeroplane-"

"GERT-I," Martin pointed out, as though Sherlock was being improper.

"-that was flying over Bristol before an unknown incident occured and it appeared in the middle of the street, with one pilot materialising in our bathroom, and the other on a small runabout starship from the future."

"Could you not say it like that?" Douglas said wearily."With that matter-of-fact attitude? It rather takes away from the gravity of the thing, I feel."

"We also have," Sherlock continued, raising a finger to add gravity because no one, _no one_ , is really immune to the commanding voice of Douglas Richardson, "a spaceship that is used to mine asteroids, on which there is a smaller spaceship with a Drive that makes the impossible-"

" _Improbable_."

"-a reality."

Sherlock looked around the room, and was met with a series of clueless looks. That was ever so slightly disappointing, as he was completely shafted himself.

"Alright, you two, Doctors," he said, snapping into action and pointing a finger at the pair. "This seems like something you might even vaguely understand. Do you have any ideas?"

Ten and Eleven looked at each other like a pair of naughty schoolboys.

"Well, I'd start by saying I seriously doubt we all occupy the same dimension," Ten started, running a hand over the back of his neck.

"Of course," Sherlock said as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"The TARDIS has meshed with itself, which always causes problems," Eleven continued, running a hand through his hair.

"Does it?" Douglas asked.

"Hm," Ten said. "She is capable of travelling through other dimensions, but just because she can, doesn't mean she should."

"Jurassic Park," John piped up.

"The walls are there for a reason," Eleven said. "Mess with them, you make them weak. Very bad for the universe. But the TARDIS, well, she must of locked onto herself somehow as we were passing in the void."

"But I'm not sure how, as I have put up a lot of safeguards to avoid that sort of thing. Again," Ten said darkly.

"So someone else, then," Sherlock said, pointing at them suddenly. "Do you have any enemies?"

It took a while for the Doctors to recover from their hysterical laughter so that they could answer. "One or two, yeah," Ten said airily.

" _EXTERMINATE_!"

"That being one of them," Eleven said warily, as both he and Ten got to their feet.

As one, the assembled group turned to the door of the flat, in front of which suddenly stood a bizarre looking robot, armed with a plunger, an egg whisk, and covered in balls. Lister cracked up.

"At least he knows what to do in the event of a polar bear attack," Douglas muttered to Martin, pointing at the egg whisk attachment. Martin sniggered.

"Everyone just get back!" the Doctor snapped, and it was only his tone that made everyone think that perhaps they had gotten the situation a little wrong. However, and rather luckily, the Dalek chose as it's first victim one Arnold Judas Rimmer, who had been a victim of the universe since the moment he had been born, and that hadn't changed just because he had died. The blue bolt shot straight through him and disintergrated the mantlepiece.

"Mrs. Hudson is going to have a fit," John mused.

"Everyone, I said back!" Ten commanded again, and everyone who wasn't currently a time travelling alien retreated to the kitchen.

"Um, ideas?" Eleven asked, whipping out his screwdriver as a matter of protocol.

"One or two, but I don't think they're going to work," Ten replied, copying Eleven's movement.

The Dalek rounded on them and raised it's weaponary threateningly.

" _EXTERMIN_ -"

-:-

"Do something!"

"I'm trying!"

"Try _harder_."

"Shut up Rory!"

"Donna..."

"Alright, there, happy? No more Dalek."

"Good, but maybe it's time we-"

"No."

"Donna, come on. I need to get back to Amy. Just to explain."

"She doesn't even know that you're gone."

"Not the point."

"Fine, but not yet. I'm not finished."

"Finished doing what?"

"No. I mean, _I'm_ not _finished_."

"Oh. Carry on then."

"Thank you."

"...Only I was done _hours_ ago."

"Shut _up_ Rory."

-:-

"Where did the psychopathic pepper pot go?" Rimmer asked.

Ten and Eleven exchanged a dark look. "No idea," they both said.

"Well, I don't know about anyone else, but while I don't understand what's going on, I am starting to believe that I may never understand it," John said.

This statement was met with many nods.

"We still haven't asked the most important question," Eleven said to Ten. "Where's the TARDIS?"

-:-

"Dave?"

No answer.

Typical.

Bloody bum.

What the hell was with the two blue boxes on board?

Oh, smeg it.

Holly was far too intelligent to care.

-:-

"I have a theory that whoever is doing all of this is not your enemy," Sherlock said.

"I'd listen to him," John said, nodding. "He's almost always right."

" _Almost_ John? _Almost_?" Sherlock muttered under his breath. John simply gave Sherlock a mildly apologetic look.

"Regardless, I'd say whoever is doing this is an amateur, unsure of what they are doing. Things are random, erratic, but the disappearance of the unstable TARDIS coupled with the sudden elimination of the Dalek lead me to believe that they do not wish for either Doctor to be harmed."

Ten and Eleven raised their eyebrows and nodded.

"That'd make a change," Eleven said.

"Look, I don't want to cause a fuss," Martin piped up suddenly. "But if GERT-I is just downstairs, can't Douglas and I just taxi her into a more open space, use Mr. Holmes' contacts to get clearance and go home to Fitton?"

"Where's Fitton?" Sherlock asked.

"Between Coventry and Daventry?" Martin chanced.

"I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country, Captain Crieff, and let me tell you that there is no place called Fitton where you just described."

"Oh," Martin replied.

"In this dimension, I'd say Fitton doesn't exist, Captain," Douglas pointed out.

"Yes, thank you, Douglas," Martin replied snappily. "But we can't just leave her down there! If there's no Fitton, there's no MJN. And if there's no MJN, there's no GERT-I, so we cannot go back without her."

"Go back?" Lister asked. "Do we have to go back?"

Ten looked at Lister miserably. "Sorry. Fabric of the universe and all that."

"So who is it who's doing all this?" Arthur asked, although he himself was far from caring. This dimension, another. Dolphins and mice and supercomputers. Fuck it all.

"No idea," the Doctors replied.

-:-

Donna took a deep breath and positioned herself in front of the make-shift console. It was a pile of crap, barely there, and, without a cage, completely pointless. Rory was busy trying to find a capable conductor for the Huon particles that wasn't still alive, and Donna doubted he was going to have much luck.

"Rory!" she shouted, pulling a lever on the ramshackle console. Nothing happened.

"What?" Rory replied tiredly. How had he gotten himself roped into this? So he and Amy weren't exactly together anymore, and so he had found himself dating a time travelling woman who had rescued him from the purgatory that was wartime America, that still didn't mean that any of this had to make sense.

Donna was a human with a secret Time Lord part, except it wasn't a secret anymore. And when she had tried to find the Doctor, tracing his signature had lead her to a despondant Rory, who had both a broken heart and a thing for redheads, but more importantly, he knew the Doctor. So Donna had taken him away from his mundane life and demanded that he join her, knowing that his 2,000 years of memories would make him resilliant against the perils of time travel.

She was most annoyed to find that the Doctor had regenerated into someone else... a new body... whatever. She had been looking forward to slapping that thin, big eyed face, and now Rory informed her that there might be a chin in the way.

Not good enough.

So she had torn apart the timelines, looking for _her_ Doctor, and somewhere along the line, she had massively fucked up.

"Rory, I'm finished," Donna called as the last whisp of golden energy left her mouth.

"Took you long enough," Rory muttered.

"Quiet," Donna said, smiling.

"Shall we? I mean, I'm starting to feel sorry for the nervous looking airline Captain."

Donna groaned. "He's going to kill me..."

"Can't you just regenerate?" Rory asked.

"You know, I have no idea," Donna said, and damn it all if she didn't pull that zigzag plotter.

-:-

"I don't wish to be the bearer of obvious news," Douglas said. "But has anyone considered that we may be stuck here?"

Everyone nodded, though only Lister did so enthusiatically.

"And it's late, and I am very tired, and I recently lost a large amount of momey when the plane full of oysters that I was transporting from Denmark suddenly travelled to another dimension. I think I'd like to go to sleep."

Martin nodded sadly. "To GERT-I?" he asked.

"To GERT-I," Douglas replied.

The pair departed with the promise that they would reutrn at a more Godly hour, and wandered down to their beloved, familiar plane.

"What about us, Listy? Back to the _Dwarf_?" Rimmer asked.

"Suppose so," Lister replied morosely.

"Hold on," Arthur called. "I'll go back to the _Heart of Gold_. I promise not to press the button," he added, after a look from Sherlock.

And then everyone was gone except for Sherlock, John, and the Doctors.

There was suddenly the smallest flicker in the corner, and the Doctors turned to one another.

"Donna!" they shouted, but she was gone almost as soon as she had arrived, the ghost of their name on her lips.

-:-

"This... all this wasn't here earlier. When I was looking for- Argh!," Martin said, falling over what looked like a large circuit board in the galley.

"Hm," Douglas merely replied, gathering up a large, silver hose like object and peering down one end of it.

"What the hell is all this stuff?" Martins said, getting to his feet and dusting down his uniform.

"And more importantly, where are we going to sleep?"

-:-

"Oh, there you are. I thought you might have died," was the miserably greeting that met Arthur, Lister and Rimmer as they returned to _Red Dwarf._

"Shut up, Marvin," Arthur said with a yawn. He started to make his way towards the _Heart of Gold_ , thinking that perhaps if he did press the button, he could probably find Ford and Trillian again as at that exact moment, it was looking _very_ unlikely. But while Arthur Dent might not have been the bravest, or the strongest, or the cleverest person going, he wasn't a complete bastard either. That Holmes chap might think that those bizarre Doctors were the cause of all this strangeness, but Arthur knew what the Improbability Drive was actually capable of. A simple matter of collapsing dimensional walls and bringing together a rag-tag bag of lunatics was basically child's play for the machine.

However, the beds on the blasted ship were extremely comfortable.

"Dave, I have readings of three unidentified craft on board," came a sudden voice which made Arthur jump.

"Is one of them a massive smegging shoe?" Lister asked wryly. "Because that's the _Heart of Thingy_ here."

There was a palpable silence.

"Dave, I have readings of _two_ unidentified craft on board."

"Where?" Rimmer piped up, feeling that as he was in charge, this report should really be being made to him.

"One in the engine room, one in the female sleeping quarters. Officers wing."

Lister looked from himself to his two companions. "We should split up, check 'em out," he said commandingly.

"No," Rimmer said at once.

"Rimmer, come on. You take the paranoid android there and head to the engine room, and I'll go with Arthur to the sleeping quarters, yeah? They won't know where they're going otherwise," Lister said with a tired tone.

"Why do I have to go with the suicidal spanner head?" Rimmer hissed.

"I heard that," Marvin said miserably.

"Rimmer, look at it," Lister said exasperately. "That thing is armed to the bloody teeth."

Rimmer's face relaxed into a slightly mollified expression. "Hm, alright. Come on, you massive suppositary," he said to Marvin snappishly.

Marvin gave a huge mechanical sigh and fell into place beside the hologram. "Doesn't mean I'll use my weapons to defend you," he said pointedly as they disappeared off towards the engine rooms.

Arthur flashed Lister a grateful smile, and they set off for the sleeping quarters.

-:-

"Old girlfriend?" John asked lightly.

Both Doctor's gave him an interesting look, sort of a mixture of huge amusement and sheer terror.

"Oh no," Ten said, shaking his head.

"God, no," Eleven added.

"So who was that, then?" Sherlock asked.

"She's a friend. Or she was," Ten said a little sadly. Eleven put his hand on his shoulder consolingly.

"Wasn't our fault," he insisted, as Ten nodded.

"What wasn't?" Sherlock asked, with all the tact of a steamroller.

"It's complicated," Ten said.

"What isn't?" John replied incredulously.

"Give us the short, layman's version then," Sherlock said. "Very short."

"Donna got a Time Lord consciousness through a metacrisis."

"Meta-what?"

"Alien thing."

"Ok."

"And she's a human, so she can't handle a Time Lord consciousness."

"Hm."

"So I had to take it away from her. As well as all of her memories of me."

"Yeah, that was..." Eleven said, bowing his head.

"So she can't be there," Ten concluded. "Because if she remembers, she'll die."

"But she wasn't dead, and she certainly saw you," Sherlock said plainly.

"No, there is that," Eleven said.

"So what the hell is going on?"

-:-

"Donna...?" Rory began tentitively.

"I _know,_ Rory," Donna replied shortly.

"Where did the not-quite-TARDIS go?"

Donna frowned. She shouldn't have tried to travel without a cage. She had gotten the briefest of glimpses of the Doctor... Doctors, seemingly holed up in a flat from a Dickens novel with a few anahronisms, but she hadn't actually moved. That was a shame, because the longer she and Rory took to get their slapdash little time machine working, the less power they would be able to draw from the barren little asteroid they were on. However, in her haste, somehow, while Donna and Rory _hadn't_ moved, the sort-of-TARDIS had. And now it was gone.

And they were stuck.

Fuck.

-:-

"Blue box!" Arthur said, pointing at the TARDIS which he and Lister had just found.

"Hm, yeah. Must be that Doctor blokes," Lister said in agreement.

"Which one?" Arthur asked.

"Both?" Lister said with a shrug. He tried the door but it was locked. "Anyway, I suppose we should go tell them we've found their ship."

Arthur nodded enthusiastically. Perhaps he could get John to make him another cup of tea.

-:-

"...which is why you are better off, in the grand scheme of things, being dead."

Rimmer nodded slowly. This android... was _incredible_. Never before had Rimmer met someone who so thoroughly understood the misery and horror of his situation, someone who sympathised instead of patronised. Only Marvin, it seemed, could fully understand what an unbelievable weight simply _being_ was for a person who had never had all the right breaks in life. He was nothing short of a genius.

The walked through the vast engine room, eyes peeled for anything that shouldn't be, when they spotted it. The TARDIS, a shock of blue against all the grey and red, innoculously tucked beneath a large exhaust vent.

"Not much to look at, is it?" Marvin said slowly.

Rimmer grinned. He _really_ liked this robot.

-:-

After an exasperating hour, where the Doctors' shared excitement at finding their beloved ship had been replaced with impatience that they had each gone to the wrong TARDIS first time round, it was time for another meeting, which took place in the cargo bay of _Red Dwarf_ and which was missing the delegation from MJN Air.

"You didn't look inside, did you?" Eleven asked Ten suspiciously.

"Of course not!" Ten replied, affronted.

"Good. I don't want you to spoil the surprise."

"You still haven't told me what causes the regeneration."

"I don't want to spoil that surprise, either."

"Hm."

"But anyway, was your TARDIS..."

"All but dead, yes. Yours?"

"Same."

"Why have your ships lost power?" Sherlock asked, but mostly to himself.

"No idea," both Doctors said by way of response.

This was starting to annoy Sherlock. He hated not knowing, but it was tolerable as he always believed that he would know _eventually_. In this instance, however, it was looking more and more like a permanant mystery, and that thought sat in his stomach like an ugly toad at the bottom of a pond.

He made a quick assesment of the facts in his mind palace.

Seven strangers, all pulled from different dimensions into his with no explanation. They needed to get back to their own worlds from his dimension. His. Dimension.

"Right, I've had enough of this. I'm going to bed. I hope you all... whatever." Sherlock turned on his heel while John stayed behind to make apologies to everyone else.

He strode out of the small mining ship and looked at the small charter aeroplane. None of this was making any sense at all. He didn't know what to do, but he was sick of standing around idle waiting for things to happen. And the pilots, who were the only ones who were neither aliens nor in possession of a spaceship, as well as being visitors to this dimension, seemed to be the missing piece of the puzzle. They were not linked to anyone else whatsoever. (Alright, so the scared looking captain and he shared some facial features, but not enought to call it a _connection_ ). That must mean-

"Oh for Christ's sake!" came a sudden shout from the aircraft as a small, round object with red flashing lights was flung from the cabin door. Sherlock stooped down and picked it up off the ground. He had no idea what it was, but regardless, he walked to the steps of the plane and through the still open door.

The plane looked like a scrapheap. There was metal and wire strewn everywhere, some parts flashing, others vibrating, and in the middle of it all stood two angry, flushed looking pilots in their shirtsleeves.

"Where did all of this junk come from?" Martin shouted again, earning a frustrated, tried look from his First Officer.

"Please don't ask me that again, Martin, or while I may not know where it all came from, I will certainly know where it is all going to go."

"Sorry," Martin said furiously, rubbing a nasty looking lump on his forehead.

"Gentlemen?" Sherlock asked, and the two men swivelled to face him as though they had found someone new to take their anger out on. "Problem?" he continued, in all truth somewhat unwisely.

"Problem?" Martin repeated evenly through gritted teeth. "Oh no, no, there's no problem." he seethed.

"Martin," Douglas said in a warning tone, and Martin's shoulders sagged a little in apology.

"Sorry, Mr. Holmes, but our plane seems to have been filled with rubbish in our absence," Douglas explained.

"So I see," Sherlock replied, glancing around. He was trying to look at the objects separately, rather than as whole, and that was when something clicked in his head.

He didn't just not know what some of the things were.

He didn't know what _any_ of them were.

And he thought back to a time not more than a few hours ago when he had felt the same, (barring dentures, whoopee cushions and a rubber chicken), and thought that perhaps there was a man or two who did.

-:-

"TARDIS parts!" Eleven exclaimed happily.

GERT-I was incredibly cramped. Marvin, who couldn't even fit through the doors, much to Rimmers dismay, had gone back to the _Heart of Gold_ , citing indifference as a reason why no one needed to feel guilty, namely he just didn't give a shit anyway. And as for Rimmer himself, fitting wasn't really a problem so long as no one stood in him.

"And why is my plane filled with spare parts?" Matin demanded, as though he thought that they should have at least been delclared on the way into the dimension.

Ten looked at Eleven, who looked right back at him with a mixture of excitement and dread.

"You don't think that she..." Ten began.

"Well, if somehow she survived the Time Lord consciousness, found a way to bypass it or something, there's no reason she couldn't..."

"And, knowing Donna..."

"She absolutely would."

"Will you two stop talking like that?" Rimmer snapped. "It's like the Wimbledon Final in here listening to you two go back and forth. Although thankfully without the unpleasant Cliff Richard association."

"Thank God," Douglas muttered.

"Sorry, it's just-" Ten began.

"Donna has somehow reawakened her Time Lord consciouness, survivng the process and in an attempt to build her own TARDIS she was the one who caused us all to be here. Undoubtedly due to the fact that the planet on which TARDIS's were originally made-slash-grown has been lost and therefore she would have to make do with whatever she could find, the makeshift-TARDIS malfunctioned and, given that it is designed to tamper with dimensional limitations, it pulled us all together, proabably in an attempt to latch on to the necessary materials needed to complete itself.

"The Doctors here possess actual TARDIS's, which would be perfect were it not for that fact that a genuine TARDIS is probably designed to withstand such a paltry onslaught and in what I assume was an attempt at an evasive manoevure they merged themselves together. Their disappearence was a protective strategy, intended to spare the Doctor from harm while they separated themselves.

"The _Heart of Gold_ was drawn here most likely due to it's Improbablity Drive, as I can only assume that a time machine made from spare parts would need to rely on quite a lot improbability made probable to even function.

" _Red Dwarf_ , on the other hand, while possessing no such fantastical equipment, does have the capacity for a type of time travel, given that with the correct modifications, it is capable of achieving light speed, and fully self sustaining future echoes.

"How does that all sound?" Sherlock finished smugly.

"Brilliant," John breathed.

"But what about GERT-I?" Martin asked.

Sherlock took another deep breath. "That is perhaps the most unclear factor here, but I assume that as the pieces for this rudimentary time machine have materialised inside, the thing was looking for a suitable housing."

"In _GERT-I_?" Douglas asked deobelievingly. "She's hardly even an aeroplane, let alone a time machine."

"Yes, that's the part that doesn't really add up," Sherlock admitted.

"Oh, come on," Martin said, jumping to his vessel's defense. "I know she's not much, but these Lockheed McDonnel's were never really designed to be. But she's served us well, hasn't she? Despite the iffy hydros, the experimental shell and that no smoking light that sometimes smells of fish."

"I'm sorry, the what?" Ten asked.

"Oh. Yeah, we try not to use it because the whole cabin reeks for-"

"Not the no smoking light!" Ten snapped. "The shell! What did you mean, 'experimental'?"

"Oh, right," Martin said. "Well, when the plane was first put into production, a handful of Lockheed's were made with the steel shell coated in a plastic sort of resin that had been sourced from this mine in Columbia. It was completely experimental, but it was expected that the resin would protect the plane better from lightning strikes. Only three or four of the Lockheed's got the treatment, as for some mysterious reason, the source dried up. In fact, I should tell Carolyn. GERT-I's actually worth a _fortune_..."

"And does it?" Sherlock pressed.

"Does it what?" Martin said stupidly.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Does it provide better protection?"

Martin laughed. "Oh God no, it doesn't make an ounce of difference," he said with a laugh while behind him, Douglas' eyes widened in horror. "But GERT-I is still perfectly fine in case of lightning strike. She has all the usual precautions. No, the only thing the resin did was increase the integrity of the hull at high speed, but not by much."

"And I wonder how this mysterious resin would hold up in the time vortex?" Ten said with a sigh that reached his sand shoes.

"Hm, yes," Eleven agreed.

"Just a moment," Douglas interjected. "You're not suggesting what I think you are, are you?"

The Doctors nodded.

"What? What are they suggesting Douglas?" Martin asked. Douglas turned to face his him.

"They want to turn GERT-I into a time machine, Captain."

-:-

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you come with me, Rory."

"It's alright. You needed me."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. And besides, the Doctor wouldn't leave us behind."

"You mean again?"

"Oh."

"Yeah."

-:-

Martin had only protested with half a heart as he watched the two time travelling aliens canibalise his precious plane. Everyone was given a job to do, even Rimmer, whose job it was to shut up. The fact was that if GERT-I wasn't made into a TARDIS, they wouldn't be able to get home, to normalcy, to Fitton, and to the inevitable wrath of Carolyn Knapp-Shappey. But still, he was a pilot there.

Once the task was completed, the sun had risen, and everyone was exhausted and filthy. The Doctors stood at the head of the assmebled men, ready to give their instructions.

"Right, here's what's going to happen," Eleven began, rubbing his hands together. "Arthur, you return to your ship, and get the android to programme in this equation into the computer and the Improbability Drive," he said, handing Arthur a slip of paper. "That should get you back to your dimension."

"I like this one," Arthur complained. "It has tea."

"Yes, but it also has _me_ ," John pointed out. "It doesn't need another one."

"It _can't_ have another one," Ten pointed out. "The paradox is ultimately unsustainable. If Arthur stays, soon there won't be any dimension with tea, as there won't be any dimensions at all!"

"Fine," Arthur replied grumpily.

"Good. Right, now Dave, Arnold, I know you're not to thrilled to be leaving again-"

"Well, why do we even have to? There's no me or Rimmer here," Lister whined.

"Not yet. But there will be in three million years, and by then it's all the same thing," Eleven said.

"I can't go back to that," Lister said heavily.

"Hey, it'll get better," Ten said cryptically. "You've waited this long. Just wait a little longer."

"What do you mean?" Lister asked, but Ten simply raised his eyebrows and looked all mysterious.

"Anyway, that little equation I just gave Arthur should also relocate _Red Dwarf_ back to where it belongs. At the right perspective size, too," Eleven concluded.

"Right, now, Sherlock and John, as this is your dimension and that is your flat... go home," Ten continued.

"Hm, fine. But there's still one thing I don't understand," Sherlock muttered.

"Just one?" John said lightly.

"Yes. Why this dimension?"

"Because if it hadn't been this dimension, with you in it, myself and I would have realised that Arthur's ship was capable of returning everyone to their own dimension without them having to leave their prospective ships, GERT-I would have returned to Fitton full of TARDIS parts that probably would have ended up on the local scrapheap, and Donna would be forever stranded wherever she is without a TARDIS. You were needed to make sure that nothing was missed. And John was needed to make tea."

"Oh, thanks a lot," John mumbled.

"And as for you two," Ten said, turning to Martin and Douglas. "Well, we can build TARDIS's, and we can fly TARDIS's. What we cannot do, however, is fly a sixteen seater charter aeroplane and besides, we need to use GERT-I to get you home."

"But we don't have clearance," Martin said.

Douglas gave him a look.

"Right," he said.

"So, that's that," Eleven concluded. "The TARDIS's only lost power because Donna's TARDIS asked them to, so once we find her, they should power back up and follow us home. And that's it, really."

"Let's get started then."

-:-

It was a gruff round off goodbyes for the group of men. They had been pulled together on the vengeful whim of an angry human woman with an alien brain, (and her occasionally Roman, 2,000 year old boyfriend who was in himself a source of vast time energy, but they weren't to know that), and that was really enough to be going on with. Rimmer and Lister returned reluctantly to _Red Dwarf_ , Arthur returned to the _Heart of Gold_ relunctantly _with_ Marvin, and Sherlock and John returned to their flat. And this is what they all did.

-:-

"Look, Listy, cheer up. You heard that skinny madman, things are going to pick up."

"Oh God Rimmer, just how bad are things if I'm getting a pep talk from you?"

Lister dropped heavily into his bunk and sighed. He had been on Earth. He had been so close, and now he was stuck on the bloody heap of junk again, with only an infuriating hologram and a mental computer for company. Perhaps when they got back they would be able to find the Cat and Kryten again, but that wasn't exactly what Lister would call a vast improvement.

There was another tremendous bang, and suddenly there they were again, in their own dimension, in Deep Space and in deep shit, as usual.

It took Lister and Kryten three weeks to find Rimmer's light bee, which hadn't rebooted due to being slammed rather forcefuly against the rim of the toilet it had fallen into.

And then a week later, there was this... noise.

This scratching, rasping noise.

And it was followed with a shout.

And the shout was 'Oi!'

-:-

The Improbability Drive performed the task of returning the two spaceships to their correct dimensions admirably. After that, it began to behave like a bitch. Arthur had the slight suspicion that somehow it just _knew_ that he had suspected, quite incorrectly, that it was the one who was somehow responsible for the whole dimension hopping affair. Either way, it seemed to have forced the computer to stop making anything that even resembled tea, and tea bearing planets were somehow impossible to land on.

And so it was lucky, just as Arthur was about to enter the more serious stages of tea withdrawal, that there was this... noise.

And when he looked in his room, he couldn't believe his eyes. Floor to ceiling were boxes and boxes of tea bags. More tea than he could ever drink in his life.

But that didn't mean he wasn't going to try.

-:-

"You... you should do it," John said with a huge yawn.

"Tomorrow," Sherlock mumbled sleepily from where he was curled up on the sofa.

"Helluva night, though, eh?" John said as he folded his hands across his stomach and closed his eyes, leaning back in his trusty armchair.

"Mmm," Sherlock muttered sleepily. "Aliens."

"Time travel."

"Your ginger little brother."

"WHAT?" Sherlock said, his head snapping up. But John just grinned and kept his eyes shut.

They were so tired, that they didn't even stir when suddenly there was this... noise.

But when they woke up there was a brand new coffee table in front of them.

And it was made of titanium.

Really sturdy stuff, that.

-:-

"Ok, so... hold on." Ten pulled a lever, through which ran a wire strewn with winking blue lights, which itself wrapped around the control column around which the hands of Captain Martin Crieff were also wrapped. The whole plane shook and juddered, and while Martin got the distinct feeling of the plane taxiing, and gathering speed for take off, it wasn't lost on him that the plane seemed to have already left the ground. Gone was Baker Street, and in it's place was a tunnel, a swirling, purpley, blue-red tunnel with electrical charges flashing all around. A thought occurred to Martin, one that he wished had occurred to him much sooner.

"What if this doesn't work?" he asked the nearest, bow-tied Doctor.

Eleven hesitated. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that," he said with a friendly smile.

"Because it _is_ going to work," Martin chanced with nigh-on foolish optimism.

"Nope. Because it is far too late to worry about it," the Doctor replied cheerfully, clapping him on the shoulder. Martin huffed.

"No Doctors in the flight deck," he muttered.

-:-

Donna, who had been sitting uselessy on a rock and essentially waiting to die, looked up suddenly. "Rory, do you feel that?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

"Yep," Rory replied, dropping an armful of wood at her feet. The both looked up into a perfectly normal corner of the sky, smiled, and waited.

-:-

"Holy hell!" Martin was shouting. Every warning light that GERT-I possessed was flashing dangerously, making the whole flight deck look like some terrifying disco. The plane yawed and pitched from side to side, throwning it's four occupants about in a way that simply gave the Doctors a warm feeling of familiarity. Martin was sure that his wrist was broken, if not at least badly sprained, and Douglas looked like he was hurriedly re-evaluating his whole life.

"If we get out of this," he hissed at Martin, "I swear you can have first crack at the cheese tray from now until the end of time."

Martin wanted to say something pithy, like, 'I'll hold you to that,' but he was too busy trying his hardest not to vomit up his lungs and therefore kept his mouth shut.

Then there was a huge crash, and the sensation of GERT-I suddenly bursting through something, like a cork out of a bottle, shot through both pilots. GERT-I was flying.

In space.

Martin threw up in his hat.

"Well done chaps," Eleven said happily, turning another dial while Ten put out a smallish fire. The plane glided on gently, and Douglas had no idea how it followed the tweaks he made with the controls, but he didn't care. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Right, now, the GERT-I TARDIS is locked on to Donna's general location," Eleven said. "From up here we'll have a better chance of getting a more stable lock, and then sand shoes and I can land this magnificent flying machine."

Martin nodded, trying to remember the part of his training that insisted pilots should _never_ close their eyes while the plane was in flight.

"Then what?" he squeaked.

"Then, hopefully, our TARDIS's will show up and you boys can go back home," Ten said.

There was a shrill beeping from the cracked monitor that was currently down at Eleven's feet. "Got her!" he said, but then he frowned. "And something else too... another temporal energy."

Ten just turned his mouth up and shrugged.

"Won't know until we land her," he said, pulling a lever.

-:-

The usual grinding, grating sound was this time accompanied by the whining roar of a powerful jet engine coming to a stop. Donna could hardly believe her eyes as in front of her, a small aeroplane slowly materialised. Next to her, Rory grabbed her arm. "No bloody way," he said, his voice faintly amused.

There was a moment where nothing happened. Even Martin didn't know what kind of post landing checks he was supposed to perform under the current situation. Then the Doctors looked at each other and an unspoken look of support passed between them, one that seemed to say both 'Good luck', and 'Brace yourself.' Then, the four men got to their feet and left plane, single file and slightly scared.

Ten was nearly knocked off of his feet by the force of Donna barelling into him.

"You... you numpty!" she crowed as she drew him into a spine bending hug. Next to him, Eleven beamed.

"Alright Donna, it's nice to breathe once in a while," Ten said in a choked voice. Donna released him, and was immediately embraced herself, this time by Eleven.

"Donna Donna Donna," he said happily, swinging her around. "My wonderful Donna."

"Hello again."

Eleven looked up, slowly, carefully, as though his mind were playing tricks on him.

Rory stood before him, a slightly put upon smile on his face.

"How... I mean.... how?" Eleven stuttered, putting a flustered and angry Donna back down on the ground.

"It's a long story," Rory said. "But what it boils down to is essentially, don't leave a man who has a lorry-load of time energy in him in a time locked pocket of... time."

Eleven looked puzzled for a minute, then he looked insanely guilty.

"Ah," he said, again.

"But how did you two..." Eleven asked, pointing between Donna and Rory.

Donna smiled.

-:-

Donna had a headache, and seventy years ago, Rory had one in his heart.

The thing for Donna was that she kept seeing things that couldn't possibly ever be, whereas on the other hand Rory kept seeing things that he knew for definite were real.

And Donna's headache got bigger, and Rory's reality got smaller, and Amy got her leg over this guy from butchers but by then it didn't really matter, because she and Rory were years apart.

Literally.

And Rory saw the past-future-past, a time before he knew the Doctor but long after the Doctor had been forced to leave him behind, about sixty odd years into the future. And he saw a woman. And she was screaming.

And Rory the Roman, who spent 2,000 years waiting for one redhead, spent sixty-odd years waiting for another.

And he didn't age, which was strange, and he didn't die, which was _really_ strange because that was kind of a habit of his.

(And the angel that had touched him lie in dust in the cemetery, but it was an arsehole anyway).

And he found Donna on the floor, on the street, which pissed her off no end but not as much as the fact that she seemed to be regenerating.

And the fact that she even knew what regenerating was.

And the fact that she knew that to keep herself alive, and the man in front of her, she could, and would, share that energy, to make two time-twisted humans survive their burden.

And Rory's regeneration echoed down the years, all the way back to the War, although which one he wasn't too sure because there had been _so many_.

And Donn'a regeneration was a lot like her in that it shouted down her Time Lord mind, and told it in no uncertain terms that if it wanted to stay in her head then it had bloody well better give up all the trying to kill her nonsense.

And then Donna got angry.

And Rory got... excited.

And they tried to build a TARDIS...

(In between all the shagging, but they left that part out because the Doctor was looking slightly green at the fact that they were even holding hands)...

And, well.

Here they were.

-:-

Martin and Douglas had spent the whole visit to the planetoid with their brains in neutral. Nothing made sense then, it didn't make sense now, and it didn't look as though it ever would. But for now, at last, they were home. Home to the terrifying rage of Carolyn, the relentless cheeriness of Arthur Shappey, and the strange news that on the night of their disappearance, a rain of oysters had been reported in Bristol.

"If we went to Baker Street..."

"No, Martin."

"Yeah, but if we did-"

"NO, Martin."

"Alright, I was thinking it might be interesting."

"Interesting? Do you remember flying this bloody thing through space?"

Martin looked around nervously.

"No," he said with a wink.

"No, neither do I," Douglas replied with a smile.

"Hey, Douglas?"

"Yes, Capatin?"

"Una Stubbs, dances in pubs."

-:-

"I quite miss the GERT-I TARDIS. It was nifty."

"You and I both know that one more trip would have taken it apart at the seams. I'm surprised it managed to get as far as it did."

The time had come for the Doctors to return to their time streams, and effectively for Donna and Rory, who had no business even _existing_ , to choose a dimension to live in.

They had managed to build yet another TARDIS, but it was made easier by the fact that they had actual TARDIS's to work with this time, and no innocent aeroplanes had to suffer.

It had been agreed by all of them, (except Rory, who had no Time Lord consciouness and therefore no idea what was going on), that it was too dangerous for Donna and the Doctor to remain in the same dimension. It was a wrench, but Eleven assure Donna that Ten would be fine, if a little fez-obsessed one day, and it was all made that much better for knowing that Donna was alive and well with her memories where they should be. The Doctors had told Donna what her attempt at building a TARDIS had done, and who it had affected.

Donna felt a bit guilty, but Rory felt worse because he was a nurse and compassion was in his nature.

And so it was decided that Donna would do just a bit of window shopping.

-:-

"Take care of yourselves Earth Girl, Roranicus."

"You too Space Man, Chin Boy."

"Thank you."

"Yeah."

-:-

"So, we're back here again," Ten said, standing outside of his TARDIS.

"Hm, we must stop meeting ourselves like this," Eleven said, pushing open the door to his own ship.

"That'd probably be for the best. Anyway, so long. I hope you find Gallifrey. It's a little sad to think that I'll never see it again looking like this," Ten said, shaking his head and sighing.

Eleven bit his lip. "I wouldn't be so sure..." he said, looking at the ceiling.

"What?"

"Nothing," Eleven replied, tapping the door to his TARDIS four times and slipping inside. Ten watched it dematerialise with interest.

"Strange man," he said, getting inside his own ship.

-:-

Donna stepped out of her TARDIS with Rory in tow, and looked around. "Ugh," the nurse commented. "This place is a dump."

"Yep," Donna replied. "But not doing too badly considering that it's three million years old." The walked down the halls of _Red Dwarf_ , the emptiness of the too-big ship incredibly apparent. Eventually they found Dave Lister and the rest of his rag tag crew striding towards them, scanners and bazookoids in their hands.

"We come in peace," Donna said quickly.

"We come in more than that," Rory said, trying to turn a phrase but sounding filthy instead.

" _Rory_."

"Sorry."

"Anyway, I'm here to apologise. And to make something up to you," Donna said, turning to the one she knew to be Lister, based on the fact that he wasn't dead, plastic or staring at his own reflection in the glass of a nearby vending machine.

"Oh yeah?" Lister asked. "What's that?"

"Well, let me start by showing you my time machine," Donna replied.

-:-

"Alright, that's the last box," Rory huffed, wiping the sweat from his brow.

"Excellent work. Let's get out of here," Donna said quickly.

"What's the rush?"

"No rush... just, I've heard there an android on board. One with one of those prototype emotion chips."

"Oh, God. Not one of those. Let's go."

-:-

It was the lazy sort of Sunday afternoon that John Watson _loathed_. Both he and Sherlock had suffered the strangest sort of culture shock since that most bizarre of nights, and it was the sort of shock that no amount of titanium coffee tables could calm. They wanted more.

And then, there was this... noise.

This wheezing, rasping noise.

This _familiar_ noise.

And the TARDIS v.2 attained two new crewmembers.

But that, as they say, is another story.

**-THE END-**

 


End file.
